Miss Pat at School Part 2

"Looking for anyone?" she asked briskly, and hardly waiting for the answer, she raised her voice and called through the door of the next room:

"h.e.l.lo, Howes! Here's someone looking for you!"

Patricia expected Margaret Howes as she emerged to show some surprise or annoyance at this summary mode of speech, but she was as serene and unconscious as ever.

"I'm busy, Griffin," she began, and then broke off as she saw the girls. "Oh, here you are," she said to Elinor. "I was looking for you in the modeling room."

The newcomer raised her pale eyebrows. "Absent-minded as ever, I see, Howes," she said with a whimsical sort of fondness in her peculiar voice. "Better run off to the head cla.s.s before you forget where you're due."

She watched Margaret Howes and Elinor till they turned into the screened entrance to the portrait room; then she turned to Patricia with easy friendliness.

"You're fresh meat, aren't you?" she asked with a grin that widened her full mouth to a line. "When'd you come?"

Patricia gave her the brief outlines of her enrolment, and she nodded approvingly.

"Good stuff in the modeling room," she commented briskly. "But don't let old Bottle Green bulldoze you into thinking it's a deaf and dumb asylum or the vestibule to the morgue or any such sequestered spot.

She's deadly dull, you know, and she almost faints if you whisper while the model is posing. She's monitor and I will say she enjoys the job."

"What does she do?" asked Patricia, delighted with the ease and candor of this speech. She felt sure this rickety, loose-jointed, pale-colored young woman was going to be worth while.

"As monitor, you mean?" responded the other, opening a locker near by and beginning to a.s.semble her implements from a jumble of all sorts of odds and ends with which the locker was overflowing. "As merely monitor she sees that the models are posed, gets the numbers ready for us to draw when there is a new model, sees to it that we don't riot too loudly through the pose, takes any complaints we may have to make, to the powers above. But as guardian angel of the cla.s.s, she soars far above our low conception of duty and propriety. Phew! Wait till you see her at it." Here her speech was lost while she delved head first into the welter.

Patricia occupied herself getting her tools from the convenient shelf on her own locker, hoping that the talk was not to end there.

Griffin emerged as suddenly as she had disappeared. "But it's the men that spoil her," she went on as though no interruption had occurred.

"They're polite to her because she's so everlastingly gloomy. Same sort of politeness they'd show to a hea.r.s.e, you know--respectful but not companionable."

Patricia gave an exclamation. "I believe I've seen her!" she cried.

"She wears a long cloak and a hat with a big black plume, doesn't she?

We noticed her at lunch and wondered what was the matter with her."

"Just a case of permanent glooms, if you ask me," replied Griffin airily. "She loves melancholy, though she is an awfully good sort, too. She gets on my nerves, though, she's so _brittle_."

Patricia puckered her brow inquiringly.

"Breaks a bone every time anyone looks hard at her," explained the other, shoving the protruding conglomeration of her locker inside and snapping the door quickly on it. "She's more bones than the average, and she breaks them regularly every time she learns the name of a new one. I think she oughtn't to be allowed in the dissecting room for any consideration. She's just out of splints now for a right arm fracture, and, believe me, she worked all the time with her left."

"How could she?" wondered Patricia, feeling awed by this devotion to art.

"She couldn't," grinned Griffin. "That's the point. She's so taken up with her pose as suffering martyr that she overlooks a trifle like good work. Heavens, there's the gong! I've kept you here ga.s.sing when I know you're crazy to get to work. Come along in, and I'll help you set up your stand before the model poses again."

Patricia followed her into the big, clay-soiled, dusty room, clutching her new smooth wooden tools with nervous fingers.

On the large revolving model stand in the center sat a dark, slender Russian-looking young man, indifferent to the group that with their tall-wheeled stands were circled about him. He sat with his narrow blue eyes sleepily fixed on the wall, regardless alike of the st.u.r.dy smocked men and slender boys in full blue-paint jackets, as of the equally silent and clayey girls and women that scrutinized him with earnestly squinting eyelids. The only creature in the room that seemed to evoke the slightest responsive flicker of intelligence was the black-robed, gray-ap.r.o.ned, redundant figure of the monitor.

Patricia's stand, with its heavy curved iron head-piece and some lengths of copper and lead wire, was waiting for her in the clay room, and together they wheeled it into the modeling room, where the gloomy Miss Green scanned them with kind but somber eyes, plainly regarding their entrance as an interruption.

"You've got to make b.u.t.terflies of the wire-loops, you know, to hold the clay up, or it'll slump down off the iron headpiece soon as you get your head set up," explained her instructor in an agreeable tone.

"It's easier to set up a head than a figure, I can tell you----"

"_Miss Griffin!_" came the dreary voice of the monitor, as with a fat and dimpled finger she pointed solemnly to the sign on the door, "No TALKING."

Griffin grinned amiably at the reproving finger. "Only the necessary instructions to a novice, Green dear," she protested smoothly. "I'm saving you the trouble of showing her how. You really ought to thank me instead of holding me up to scorn."

Miss Green, with a kindly glance at Patricia, puckered up her lips in the circle that only fat, soft-fleshed people can accomplish and laid the impartial finger on them as a sign that no more words were to be wasted, and the cla.s.s, temporarily attentive to the newcomers, became absorbed again.

A heavy-shouldered dark man, whose workmanlike appearance was heightened by the torn and spotted linen ap.r.o.n he wore, came quietly over to Patricia, and, taking the wire from Miss Griffin's thin, nervous hands, silently and swiftly finished the work she had begun, while she, with a nod of acquiescence, went to her own stand and began to thump lumps of clay into shape about her own iron head-piece.

Patricia accepted the help as silently as it was offered, and when he brought her clay and, still mute, showed her how to block the rough clay into a semblance of a human head, she smiled at him with ready grat.i.tude, not daring more for fear of the omnipotent Miss Green.

"How do you like it now?" asked Griffin, as the gong released them for the rest, and they slipped out in the corridor to look for Elinor.

"Perfectly fine and dandy!" cried Patricia, glowing. "My word, but that Miss Green is severe! I never _heard_ such silence as in that room. Why, an ordinary schoolroom is a perfect Babel compared to it."

"You'll get used to old Bottle Green, all right," said Griffin rea.s.suringly. "Her bark is a whole lot worse than her bite. She's a trump at heart, though she _is_ awful fool on the outside."

Elinor was waiting for them, and Patricia could see that she was in a state of great agitation. She hurried to her, while her companion dropped behind to exchange notes with one of the men from the composition room.

"What is it, Norn? Didn't you get along all right?" she asked breathlessly.

Elinor dropped on a stool and raised her face to her sister, and Patricia was surprised to see that her eyes were shining with joy instead of tears.

"Oh, Miss Pat!" she cried in an ecstasy. "I've made good, and I can write to Bruce and tell him!"

"What, already?" exclaimed Patricia rapturously. "You _duck_! Tell me all about it instantly."

She swept Elinor off the stool, away from the crowded dressing room, and at last found a deserted corner behind a big cast.

"Now," she demanded, "tell me all about it, or I'll simply die of ingrowing curiosity."

Elinor rippled and dimpled in a surprisingly sparkling fashion as she recounted her experience in the portrait room, and Patricia, while she listened, marveled at the change in her placid sister.

"And so," concluded Elinor, "when I had just gotten ready to come out to see you, some more of them came over and looked at it. And one of them said, 'Dorset's right. It's a pace-maker all correct,' and then they brought some other men, and I left."

Patricia, greatly excited, patted her hard on the shoulder. "I told you you'd be a winner," she crowed. "I guess Bruce knew what he was talking about."

Elinor's face clouded. "But I have only started the outline," she confessed. "And I'm awfully weak on putting in the tones. I'm afraid I'll make a fizzle of it."

"See here," said Patricia, facing her severely. "I'm tired of your deceptive timidity. Just let someone else say you can't do it, and you'd feel mighty mad about it, but you're willing to scare me out of my feeble senses by croaking."

Elinor jumped up laughing, and hugged her. "I'll be as conceited as you like, if you'll stop scolding," she promised, gayly. "It doesn't look well to be too much under the thumb of a younger sister, even if she is a promising sculptor. By the way, how are _you_ getting on? I hear that Miss Griffin is a wonderful worker. Did you see anything of her work?"

Patricia gave her a brief outline of the cla.s.s and its chief characters, as far as she had observed, dwelling on Miss Green with great satisfaction.

"I know she's going to be a treat," she declared. "I hope she keeps whole for a while at least, until I get better acquainted."

"And do you know," she went on, "that the model is a Russian refugee, and he tried to kill himself because he was so homesick. He's just out of the hospital, and he has a great red scar across his breast. Isn't it exciting to be among such different sort of people? We've always been so sort of tabbified."

"We've had enough ups and downs, I am sure," said Elinor vaguely. It was evident that her mind was not on either their varied past nor even the fascinating present, but was busy with a future of progress and achievement.